:up:

postmodern philosophy was formed in part in opposition to Marxism
— Joshs

How, exactly? — Jackson

Marxism relies on an emancipatory meta-narrative (dialectical materialism). Postmodern deconstructs all grand meta-narratives , like the narrative of progress or thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

I deeply wish this were not so, but it is. Feel free to comment on other post-modern fantasies that you know of. — Bitter Crank

My only gripe is with the title of the OP. There is a tendency to lump together Marxism and postmodernism. They are not the same. In fact, postmodern philosophy was formed in part in opposition to Marxism, contrary to what people like Jordan Peterson claim.

Quaint, but wrong. You believe that you were able to put your thoughts together, you believe that you can speak English, you believe that you can type a message on a computer and have it shared across this community. — Banno

I’ll go along with this , as long as ‘belief’ ’ is interchangeable with ‘anticipation’ or ‘expectation’. That way we can include perception in general.

Look into this box of apples. They are all Delicious apples, a kind of apple. Now look closely at each one after carefully counting them - there are 24. Each apple is unique, being distinguished from the others in small ways. We see this as we contemplate these apples, a particular kind of apple. After a bit each apple seems to turn its best side toward our gaze, and we begin to contemplate what may lie on their opposite sides. In so doing we drift into a meditative state in which apples prevail, even those not Delicious. — jgill

In this example , the category ‘apple’ subsumes the particularities of the individual apples. The parts
can vary ( kinds of apples) without altering the whole ( the category apple). But does this logical subsumption bear any resemblance to how we actually construct and experience the relation between parts and wholes? Or is it the case, as the Gestaltists say, that the whole precedes its parts and the parts redefine the whole?

Wittgenstein analyzed the issue of the meaning of parts and wholes.

“There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expres- sion to think that the man who has learned to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf', has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learned the meaning of the word 'leaf'; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing 'in him' an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is common to all these leaves; and this is true if we mean that he can on being asked tell us certain features or properties which they have in common. But we are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which contains what is common to all leaves. This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means, we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of a name with the meaning of the name).

(d) Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science.I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of meta- physics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.”
(The Blue Book, pp. 17)

The use of models presumes the presence of beings that function according to their nature. T — Paine

Or a model can allows us to pragmatically anticipate the future course of events that never duplicate themselves but nonetheless change in ways that can reveal a certain inferential compatibility (the way a thing continues to be the ‘same’ differently). No notion of fixed kinds, beings or natures is necessary in order to do this.

The phenomena must be measurable, and events must be repeated to check models for viability. That such phenomena yield results of this kind is no promise of a clear separation between 'subject and object'.

And if the process of investigating this issue doesn't help separate the two qualities, it won't help us unify them either. — Paine

Unification in the case of the subjective and objective aspects of experience does not mean combination, it means inseparability. I follow writers like Dan Zahavi here:

“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”

Isn't "electron" a kind? Do they not all have an electric charge of quantity -1? — Relativist

Look at the period at the end of this sentence. Now keep on staring at it. We say that the period is a kind, an identity persisting in time with attributes and properties that belong to it. Mathematics begins from , and depends on , such reifications. But , most fundamentally , that is not how you are experiencing the period as you continue to gaze at it. It is not simply that your gaze or body posture subtly shifts your perspective, but that your sense of the meaning of what you are perceiving also shifts is subtle ways every moment. Each repetition of the period is a subtly new interpretation of it. This is not even including the ways in which the period , as a natural object, is not simply a system of relations among fixed kinds of physical particles. When we employ concepts like ‘kind’,property’ and ‘attribute’ so as to see electrons with numerically assigned charge, we are masking all of this underlying subtle but incessant dynamism and change for the sake of convenience. Our mathematics begins only after we have concealed what happens within ‘kinds’.

Your first sentence sounds consistent with law realism. I don't know what to make of your second sentence, other than that it sounds like an interpretation of quantum mechanics. Please explain.

Are you a nominalist? — Relativist

I’m a phenomenologist, but the inextricable relation between quantitative interaction and qualitative
transformation I described comes from Deleuze , whose touchstone was Nietzsche. For both orientations lawfulness , self-identity, the ability to carve out and iterate a pristine quantitative realm within a qualitative dimension are idealizations that invent rather than represent the real. A ‘kind’ is not a category, object, identity. It is a differentiation. There are no quantities within kinds. Every iteration of quantity is a change of kind.
Strange stuff from a realist perspective.

No, it's not packaged in an inherent way, but the success of our inferred mathematical relations suggests there is an ontological basis to it.

“As you can see, I’m a mathematical constructivist, not a platonist.”(Josh)

I'm also not a Platonist. I have an Aristotelian view of immanent universals (more directly: an Armstrongian view). — Relativist

What I reject is the idea that the regularity and consistency of physical relations reduces to differences of degree that are not at the same time differences in kind. Put differently, quantitative measurement introduces qualitative change at every repetition of the counting.

Better things to do. — Jackson

Name one

Why? — Jackson

Why not?

Never heard of it before you. — Jackson

look up Eugene Wigner.

Why is math effective? Because there is structure to the world that is describable with mathematics.

Why is the world describable with mathematics? Because there are regular, consistent physical relations between objects that have an inherent mathematical component (like an inverse square law). — Relativist

I was with you in your first paragraph. But the fact that there is structure to the world does not mean that the world comes to our awareness packaged an ‘inherent’ way that is already mathematical. Nature became mathematizable when we contributed our own peculiar interpretive structures to it.
As you can see, I’m a mathematical constructivist, not a platonist.

The problem is 'hard' because of correspondence. The success of scientific methods is that models fit the objects being pursued by restricting what is counted as an event. Our given experience of being conscious beings is an event. Can it be understood in the way other phenomena are understood? Or attempted to be understood? — Paine

This may be why it is hard, but it is a problem in the first place not because the model is restricted to physical objects and excludes subjective events, but because the model understands the physical object in a limited manner which prevents it from unifiying the objective and the subjective.

Glad someone remembered the anniversary of this great but controversial philosopher.

I don't just write something and not defend it. I do try to rebut objections, even if people think it unsatisfactory. I write in good faith. — schopenhauer1

Unless you believe that your take on the pre-conditions for a moral stance is utterly original, it might help at this point if you could scrounge up some supportive quotes from a well known moral philosopher. Then you won’t have bear the burden of defending your view all by yourself. Let the academic philosophers make your argument for you ( or with you) and force your respondents to deal with them.

Almost every so called bad word we use is related to sex and the body, so that a person growing in this society must in some way feel or consider the sexual stuff to be bad and naughty. — Razorback kitten

Intense sensation (bodily smells) , pleasure or emotion is frightening to people because it signifies irrationality and loss of moral control. That’s why religions have wanted to control gluttony( google history of the Graham cracker) dance and music as well as sex.

Just seems like more ways to justify suffering.This particular thread is saying that if preferences satisfied are a moral standard than this existence entails it never being moral. — schopenhauer1

That’s becuase you haven’t examined the coherence of your ‘alternative’ closely enough.
Isnt morality about imperfect choices?
Never having been born is your notion of divinity , that which ends all suffering. Therefore , your preference is for never having been born. If that were satisfied you would consider it moral. One would have to accept your concept of having never been born as a preferable alternative to life in order to consider existence immoral.

The point is that an existence with some preference never met means that existence is not moral. Period. That’s if we believe that peoples preferences being met is the moral standard. — schopenhauer1

What is the moral thing to do? That’s easy. If one understands morality as a standard delimiting the way things ought to be , then in general terms the moral is
what satisfies that standard.In order for morality to work as a standard or principle , it cannot just refer to contingent , local and relative situation. The preferred standard, principle must point to a certain universality , or at least reliable ongoing identity in what it chooses.

For instance , if the notion of not-being born is conceived as a preferable alternative to life, then it is the moral choice because it is a universal. Not being born doesn’t change its stripes and become some sort of lived experience all of a sudden. It must be conceived
as pure and unchanging. It acts as a moral ground in a way similar not how God serves as the basis of all morality for the religious. In both cases there is an assumed unchanging fundamental truth to hang our moral standard on. We can rely on the never-having-been-born to always be devoid of suffering and pain, as well as joy. It is a perfect neutrality.
But I want to contrast this view of morality with the Nietzsche’s extra-moral perspective. For Nietzsche non-being and not-having-been-born are
themselves kinds of beings. For him a being is a difference in drives or affects. Never-having-been-born is not a pure neutrality that preceded life, it only exists or appears , that is , it is born as a contrast, a differentiation in one’s thinking, a desired remedy for one’s suffering, just as God serves this purpose for the religious.
Nietzsche calls this will to nothingness the acetic ideal, a drive or craving for perfect neutrality and the completely unchanging.

It has been said that the ‘nothing’ cannot be thought, but in thought is the only place it resides. And each time the ‘nothing’ is thought , it is thought differently , in response to always different concerns and contexts. The nothing is always fecund, creative rather than a simple lack or absence. Likewise , every time you come back to the topic of the never-having-been-born, you have something new to say about it. But this having something new to say isnt just dancing around the edges and pointing to the perfect, pure never changing affective neutrality of the nothing. You are each time slightly changing the very sense and meaning of the never-having-been-born in ways that are invisible to you.
Each time you talk or think about it , you are giving birth to new life and new sense.

But even though this is so, you consider it as static and fixed , and you also think of its contrary , life , in terms that are static and fixed For you life’s suffering has a non-changing essence, so for you morality is a battle between eternal suffering and eternal nothingness.

For Nietzsche the two sides of this battle are really the same concept, truth and morality as the unchanging , the pure, the perfect. Nietzsche wants to replace this traditional morality with an ethics that recognizes, celebrates and accelerates the incessant differentiating change underlying and overflowing your static notions of the nothing and of suffering.

I find something of value and interest in Whitehead's panexperientialism, but the idea that rocks have minds does not convince; nevertheless to each their own.. — Janus

You may be interested in this paper by John Protevi. He discusses Evans Thompson’s book, Mind in Life, where he locates mind in the most general functions of all living systems. Mind and life are co-extensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Protevi suggests that it may be possible to push this back to include pre-living processes.

“…we have to worry that a definition of mind as mere information transfer involved in self-organization is so broad as to be meaningless: if convection currents in a pot of boiling water are mind, what good is such a broad definition? But on the other hand, what‘s exciting about dynamic systems modeling is that it shows self-organizing processes in an extremely wide range of registers, from convection currents through neurodynamics. So if self-organization is a univocal concept, that is, if there is a non-trivial shared structure between convection currents and neurodynamics, then we have identified a fundamental principle that links the inorganic and organic registers. So we‘re back to the cybernetic challenge: is information transfer and self-organization capable of being called ―mind‖ in a defensible fashion? It wouldn‘t be autopoietic cognition, because it‘s doesn‘t involve a membrane-metabolism recursive process and hence an autonomous subject position. But wouldn‘t it be ―Mind in Process,‖ even if it‘s not ―Mind in Life?”



http://www.protevi.com/john/Deleuze-Thompson-web-version.pdf

Clearly, philosophy was a step forward in the right direction; rationality was made the cornerstone of all knowledge. — Agent Smith

And again in the 20th and 21st centuries philosophy takes a step in the right direction, problematizing concepts like rationality and knowledge.

If I agree to use the definitions you are using, I already have to just accept (probably without fully understanding) that element of your worldview. — SatmBopd

I have found that very few on this site understand the significance of the concept of worldview for ascertaining truth in philosophy and science, which is why so many cling to predicate logic , true-false statements and belief in transparent definition of terms, as if that were an obvious starting point rather than a never fully realizable end goal of discussion.

↪Joshs One learns the grammar of "I" and "me". — Banno

But not just unidirectionally through language, as if we were stimulus-response creatures. There is a bi-directional reciprocal shaping between organism
and languaged community. If there were only one way shaping from the social unit to its bodies , there would be no need for the concept of ‘I’ in the first place, only a vast cultural we-self.

All you can say is that only you can have your experiences; but that says nothing. — Banno

You can also say that you can check your current experiences against previous experiences, and that in fact perception is based on this meeting between expectation derived from one’s past and the present event. This is knowing as interpretive recognition. By the same token, we can check our expectations concerning the way another person will react to and interpret an event against their actual behavior from our vantage. This is how we determine that there are ‘others’ in the first place , by their violation of our expectations that we can come to anticipate. We learn this way that other people are like me but also different. We can engage with them and form imperfect mutual
understandings using the ‘same’ language , that don’t overcome so much as they are built upon these interpersonal differences.

In sum , my ‘self’ is an ongoing checking of events against expectations. Through this process there is revealed an ongoing ‘self’ that is never self -identical but that for the most part continues to recognize itself though it’s familiarity with its perceptions of its world, its body and its thoughts and feelings. Of course, this achievement of a unified self is tenuous. Psychosis can split this ongoing unity into alien selves. But because in most cases a self-consistency is maintained over time, this provides a basis for distinguishing self from other in a fashion similar to how one experiences one’s own self as changing over time.

It's not supposed to imply any comparison.
— bert1

Says Nagel. But what else does the word "like" mean? — Jackson

Here’s Dan Zahavi’s version of it:

“Compare your experiences of perceiving an apple and remembering a banana. In one respect, these experiences are very different. They differ both with regard to their object or content and with regard to their act type or attitude. In another respect, however, the two experiences have something very fundamental in common: in both cases, it is for you that it is like something to have them. Arguably, for every possible experience that we have, each of us can say: whatever it is like for me to have the experience, it is for me that it is like that to have it. What-it-is-like-ness is properly speaking what-it-is-like-for-me-ness.

On our view, this for-me-ness is a universal feature of experience. Some philosophers maintain that this for-me-ness is a philosophical myth, with no psychological
reality whatsoever. Others accept the existence of for-me-ness but do not think it is an essential or even universal characteristic of consciousness. We have argued for our view that it is universal and essential elsewhere (Kriegel 2003 and 2009; Zahavi 2000, 2005, 2011, and 2014) and will take it for granted here.
The for-me-ness of experience still admits of two crucially different interpretations. According to a deflationary interpretation, it consists simply in the experience occurring in someone (a ‘me’).

On this view, for-me-ness is a non-experiential aspect of mental life – a merely metaphysical fact, so to speak, not a phenomenological fact. The idea is that we ought to resist a no-ownership view according to which experiences can occur as free­floating unowned entities. Just as horse-riding presupposes the existence of a horse, experiencing presupposes a subject of experience. In contrast, a non-deflationary interpretation construes for-me-ness as an experiential aspect of mental life, a bona fide phenomenal dimension of consciousness. On this view, to say that an experience is for me is precisely to say something more than that it is in me. It is to state not only a metaphysical fact, but also a phenomenological fact. Here the relationship between experiencing and the subject goes deeper than that between horse-riding and the horse.We favor a non-deflationary interpretation of the for-me-ness of experience.”

Modern science invented the idea of subjectivity. Brief comment, but I can defend it. — Jackson

That’s right , by inventing the idea of objectivity. Objective reality is incoherent without a subject to apprehend it.

↪Wayfarer No, my friend, for the reason that "subjective experiences" are not objective; to require that subjectivity be described objectively is a category mistake, which is why (most contemporary philosophers (of mind) and almost all cognitive neuroscientists consider) Chalmer's "Hard Problem" a pseudo-problem. — 180 Proof

So two distinct categories exist, the objective and the subjective , the first person and the third person? One could call this the hard dualism, or deny the subjective aide as Dennett does and end up with a hard monism. In either case, whether one considers this spilt a problem to be solved or not, one is accepting the traditional dualism between subjective and objective.
Neurophenomenologists , enactive cogntive scientists and postmodernist philosophers neither dismiss or reify the hard problem. The dissolve it by showing the subjective and the objective to be inextricable aspects of all experience rather than separate categories.

And yet those fields and processes have a mathematical description and all mathematical descriptions are reducible to pure sets. — litewave

Are pure sets transcendent foundations in math, like platonic essences? The statement that “all mathematical descriptions are reducible to pure sets” sounds very final and eternal, as if it must always be thus.

difference between objects means that they have different identities. In general, every two objects have some different properties and some same properties and thus there is a particular difference (or similarity) relation between the two objects. — litewave

Evan Thompson, in Mind in Life , offers the new vision of objective science:

“In the context of contemporary science … ―nature does not consist of basic particulars, but fields and processes … there is no bottom level of basic particulars with intrinsic properties that upwardly determines everything else. Everything is process all the way down and all the way up, and processes are irreducibly relational—they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations, or webs…. There is no base level of elementary entities to serve as the ultimate emergence base on which to ground everything. “(Thompson 2007: 440-1)

the mathematics (structure) of quantum mechanics, or of the quantum-mechanical world, is reducible to well-defined pure sets, just as all mathematics is. — litewave

The model of well-defined pure sets is perfectly suited to a philosophical grounding of the real in terms of the empirical object , and this in turn makes use of assumptions from logic concerning the definition of identity.

Continental Philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries has set its sights on critiquing traditional notions
of identity.

As Dan Smirh writes :


“Classical logic identified three such principles: (1) the principle of identity (which says that ‘A is ‘A’, or ‘A thing is what it is’), (2) the principle of non-contradiction, which
says that ‘A is not non-A’ (‘A thing is not what it is not’), and (3) the prin­ciple of the excluded middle, which says that between A or not-A, there is no middle term). Taken together, these three principles determine what is impossible, that is to say, what is unthinkable: something that would not be what it is (which would contradict the principle of identity); some­thing that would be what it is not (which would contradict the principle of non-contradiction); and something that would be both what it is and what it is not (which would contradict the principle of the excluded middle). By means of these three principles, thought is able to think the world of what is possible (or what traditional philosophy called the
world of ‘essences’). But this is why logic does not take us very far.”

Common to Wittgenstein , phenomenology and various postmodern strands of thought is a re-thinking of the relation between identity and difference. Difference is not added onto , as the interactive behavior of, defined objects, but the precondition of identity.

Nagel really never explains what this means and I think the concept is incoherent. — Jackson

Dan Zahavi has spent his career meticulously defining ‘the feeling of what it is like for me’. I dont happen to agree with him; too Kantian for me.

Probability is reducible to well-defined pure sets too, so there is nothing undefined ontologically. Something either exists exactly as it is or it doesn't exist. Probability is just a tool to quantify our epistemic uncertainty. — litewave

Is ontological definition the same as determinism? Can a non-deterministic world be defined in the way you describe?

I think self consciousness is just a form of consciousness. The "self" is just the modern emphasis on the individual. "I see red" and "I know myself as seeing red" are rhetorically different, but logically both mean, "I see red." — Jackson

Let’s see if you agree with this: I dont go along with writers like Nagel who want to establish some sort of self-identical ‘I’ that accompanies every perception and infuses it with some sort of special feeling of me-ness.
Instead, I think the self is contingent, and constantly changes along along with other aspects of our experience. But I think it’s important to recognize that when we perceive a sound or color or touch sensation , we are not just passively receiving data. What we experience in its actuality is a synthesis that includes our expectations derived from prior experience. That is why two people receiving the same ‘data’ from the world will experience it in slightly different ways. So the feeling of what anything is like will always differ from
person to person. But by the same token, the ‘self’ that projects the expectations which enter into what a sensation is for each of us is always changing. Therefore , what it is like for me to experience the ‘same’ color over time is never the same for me, because I am never the same ‘I’.

Except such a difference is undefined and therefore doesn't exist. Its supposed definition refers to other definitions that refer to other definitions etc., thus the initial difference is never defined. A difference between differences between differences etc. — litewave

That’s where probabilistic description comes into play.
‘Postmodern’ quantum mechanics is different so f ways to model how ‘stuffs’ are made from differential relations.

Relations between what? — litewave

Relations between relations. To exist is to make a difference. Deleuze is one of the philosophers articulating this idea:

“ Normally we think of difference as an empirical relation between two things that have a prior identity (‘x is different from y’), but Deleuze takes the concept of difference to a properly transcendental level: the differential relation is not only external to its terms (Bertrand Russell’s empiricist dictum), but it also conditions or determines its terms. In other words, the differential relation becomes constitutive of identity: difference becomes productive and genetic.”

I see red. I don't feel myself seeing red — Jackson

You do both simultaneously:

“Although these two sides can be distinguished conceptually, they cannot be separated. It is not as if the two sides or aspects of phenomenal experience can be detached and encountered in isolation from one other. When I touch the cold surface of a refrigerator, is the sensation of coldness that I then feel a property of the experienced object or a property of the experience of the object? The correct answer is that the sensory experience contains two dimensions, namely one of the sensing and one of the sensed, and that we can focus on either.”( Dan Zahavi)

We also can distinguish the mode of givenness of a perception. We can tell whether it is actual , a recollection or something we imagine.

It just seems like an incoherent position to me that there could be relations without non-relations (stuffs, or "inner aspects", as you call them). — litewave

This thinking is the basis of not only a host of postmodern philosophies but of newer thinking in the cognitive sciences , and perhaps physics.

“...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162).”
(Merleau-Ponty)

By "stuff" I mean something that is not a relation. Are you saying that only relations exist? Or what exists? — litewave

Yes, only relations exist, and every relation is the creation of a new differentiation.

But when we realize that the equations describe composition relations between stuffs then it becomes clear that the existence of stuffs is not only natural but also necessary for the existence of any relations. — litewave

This sounds like it’s leading toward a kind of panpsychism in the vein of Chalmers: all matter is composed of stuffs just as the psyche is composed of felt stuffs. But this elevating of stuffs to the position of fundamental basis of matter reifies rather than dissolves the hard problem.
There are no such things as stuffs , either in the form of subjective qualia or objective matter. Stuff is a derivative abstraction that has convenient uses in the sciences.